Sacred Dread

<p>In early twentieth-century France a vast network of artists writers and religious seekers were drawn to Roman Catholicism's elaborate panoply of symbols centered on suffering. A preoccupation with affliction dominated the movement now known as the French Catholic revival or the <i>renouveau catholique</i>--considered a watershed in the history of the modern Catholic Church and the golden age of French Catholicism. In <i>Sacred Dread</i> Brenna Moore examines the life and writings of Raïssa Maritain (1883-1960) one of the few women to contribute to this intellectual movement. Moore explores the reasons why Maritain a nonpracticing Jew was attracted to this suffering-centered theological imagination and how she and other advocates transformed it in the wake of the Holocaust. <i>Sacred Dread</i> offers readers a new understanding of a radical Catholic piety that was embraced by a wide range of pre-war intellectuals. </p><p>By combining late-modern French intellectual and cultural history Catholic theology biography and an analysis of Maritain's published and unpublished writings Moore also identifies two major factors in this Catholic revival--gender and Judaism--that have not received adequate attention. Discourses of femininity and Judaism were central to the French Catholic articulation and idealization of suffering. Moore argues that Maritain as a Jewish convert and one of the few women in this intellectual community embodied symbolic associations of suffering holiness women and Jews; indeed for her husband godfather confessors friends and godchildren Raïssa Maritain was herself the articulation of this abject ideal. Caught as she was in a web of meaning Raïssa Maritain was an intellectual whose legacy deepens but also subverts the centrality of femininity and Judaism in French Catholic elaborations of suffering.</p>